Preferential trade agreements have become common ways to protect or restrict access to national markets in products and services. The United States has signed trade agreements with almost two dozen ...countries as close as Mexico and Canada and as distant as Morocco and Australia. The European Union has done the same. In addition to addressing economic issues, these agreements also regulate the protection of human rights. InForced to Be Good, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton tells the story of the politics of such agreements and of the ways in which governments pursue market integration policies that advance their own political interests, including human rights.
How and why do global norms for social justice become international regulations linked to seemingly unrelated issues, such as trade? Hafner-Burton finds that the process has been unconventional. Efforts by human rights advocates and labor unions to spread human rights ideals, for example, do not explain why American and European governments employ preferential trade agreements to protect human rights. Instead, most of the regulations protecting human rights are codified in global moral principles and laws only because they serve policymakers' interests in accumulating power or resources or solving other problems. Otherwise, demands by moral advocates are tossed aside. And, as Hafner-Burton shows, even the inclusion of human rights protections in trade agreements is no guarantee of real change, because many of the governments that sign on to fair trade regulations oppose such protections and do not intend to force their implementation.
Ultimately, Hafner-Burton finds that, despite the difficulty of enforcing good regulations and the less-than-noble motives for including them, trade agreements that include human rights provisions have made a positive difference in the lives of some of the people they are intended-on paper, at least-to protect.
Network Analysis for International Relations Hafner-Burton, Emilie M.; Kahler, Miles; Montgomery, Alexander H.
International organization,
07/2009, Letnik:
63, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
International relations research has regarded networks as a particular mode of organization, distinguished from markets or state hierarchies. In contrast, network analysis permits the investigation ...and measurement of network structures—emergent properties of persistent patterns of relations among agents that can define, enable, and constrain those agents. Network analysis offers both a toolkit for identifying and measuring the structural properties of networks and a set of theories, typically drawn from contexts outside international relations, that relate structures to outcomes. Network analysis challenges conventional views of power in international relations by defining network power in three different ways: access, brokerage, and exit options. Two issues are particularly important to international relations: the ability of actors to increase their power by enhancing and exploiting their network positions, and the fungibility of network power. The value of network analysis in international relations has been demonstrated in precise description of international networks, investigation of network effects on key international outcomes, testing of existing network theory in the context of international relations, and development of new sources of data. Partial or faulty incorporation of network analysis, however, risks trivial conclusions, unproven assertions, and measures without meaning. A three-part agenda is proposed for future application of network analysis to international relations: import the toolkit to deepen research on international networks; test existing network theories in the domain of international relations; and test international relations theories using the tools of network analysis.
“Naming and shaming” is a popular strategy to enforce international human rights norms and laws. Nongovernmental organizations, news media, and international organizations publicize countries' ...violations and urge reform. Evidence that these spotlights are followed by improvements is anecdotal. This article analyzes the relationship between global naming and shaming efforts and governments' human rights practices for 145 countries from 1975 to 2000. The statistics show that governments put in the spotlight for abuses continue or even ramp up some violations afterward, while reducing others. One reason is that governments' capacities for human rights improvements vary across types of violations. Another is that governments are strategically using some violations to offset other improvements they make in response to international pressure to stop violations.
The authors examine the impact of the international human rights regime on governments' human rights practices. They propose an explanation that highlights a "paradox of empty promises." Their core ...arguments are that the global institutionalization of human rights has created an international context in which (1) governments often ratify human rights treaties as a matter of window dressing, radically decoupling policy from practice & at times exacerbating negative human rights practices, but (2) the emergent global legitimacy of human rights exerts independent global civil society effects that improve states' actual human rights practices. The authors' statistical analyses on a comprehensive sample of government repression from 1976 to 1999 find support for their argument. 4 Tables, 2 Figures, 3 Appendixes, 84 References. Adapted from the source document.
A growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have come to
play a significant role in governing state compliance with human rights.
When they supply hard standards that tie material ...benefits of integration
to compliance with human rights principles, PTAs are more effective than
softer human rights agreements (HRAs) in changing repressive behaviors.
PTAs improve members' human rights through coercion, by supplying the
instruments and resources to change actors' incentives to promote
reforms that would not otherwise be implemented. I develop three
hypotheses: (1) state commitment to HRAs and (2) PTAs supplying soft human
rights standards (not tied to market benefits) do not systematically
produce improvement in human rights behaviors, while (3) state commitment
to PTAs supplying hard human rights standards does often produce better
practices. I draw on several cases to illustrate the processes of
influence and test the argument on the experience of 177 states during the
period 1972 to 2002.I would like to thank
Mike Colaresi, Dan Drezner, David Lake, Lisa Martin, Walter Mattli, John
Meyer, Mark Pollack, Erik Voeten, Jim Vreeland, and two anonymous
reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful comments on various drafts of
this manuscript, as well as the many other people who have helped me by
asking hard questions along the way. I would also like to thank Michael
Barnett, Charles Franklin, and Jon Pevehouse for advice during the
dissertation research that supports this article, and Alexander H.
Montgomery for assistance in data management. All faults are my own. For
generous assistance in the collection of data, I thank the National
Science Foundation (SES 2CDZ414 and SES 0135422), John Meyer, and
Francisco Ramirez. For support during the writing of the article, I thank
Nuffield College at Oxford University, and most importantly, Lynn Eden and
Stanford's Center for International Security and
Cooperation.
When Do Governments Resort to Election Violence? Hafner-Burton, Emilie M.; Hyde, Susan D.; Jablonski, Ryan S.
British journal of political science,
01/2014, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
When are governments most likely to use election violence, and what factors can mitigate government incentives to resort to violence? How do the dynamics of election violence differ in the pre- and ...post-election periods? The central argument of this article is that an incumbent's fear of losing power as the result of an election, as well as institutionalized constraints on the incumbent's decision-making powers, are pivotal in her decision to use election violence. While it may seem obvious to suggest that incumbents use election violence in an effort to fend off threats to their power, it is not obvious how to gauge these threats. Thus, a central objective of this article is to identify sources of information about the incumbent's popularity that can help predict the likelihood of election violence. The observable implications of this argument are tested using newly available cross-national evidence on elections, government use of pre- and post-election violence, and post-election protests from 1981 to 2004.
A social science of human rights Hafner-Burton, Emilie M
Journal of peace research,
03/2014, Letnik:
51, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Why do governments abuse human rights, and what can be done to deter and reverse abusive practices? This article examines the emerging social science on these two questions. Over the last few ...decades, scholars have made considerable progress in answering the first one. Abuse stems, centrally, from conflict and institutions. Answers to the second question are more elusive because data are scarce and the relationships between cause and effect are hard to pin down. Lively debates concern the effectiveness of tools such as military intervention, economic policy, international law, and information strategies for protecting human rights. The evidence suggests that despite the explosion of international legal instruments, this strategy has had impact only in special circumstances. Powerful states play central roles in protecting human rights through sanctions, impartial military intervention, and other tools – often applied unilaterally, which suggests that there is an ongoing tension between the legitimacy of broad multilateral legal institutions and narrower strategies that actually work. The best approaches to managing human rights depend on the political organization of the abuser. Where strong centralized organizations are the problem, the best strategies alter the incentives of leaders at the top; where abuse arises from disarray, such as during civil war or fragile democratic transition, the key tasks include reducing agency slack and making organizations stronger and more accountable.
Abstract
This article introduces a Thematic Section and theorizes the multiple ways that judicializing international relations shifts power away from national executives and legislatures toward ...litigants, judges, arbitrators, and other nonstate decision-makers. We identify two preconditions for judicialization to occur—(1) delegation to an adjudicatory body charged with applying designated legal rules, and (2) legal rights-claiming by actors who bring—or threaten to bring—a complaint to one or more of these bodies. We classify the adjudicatory bodies that do and do not contribute to judicializing international relations, including but not limited to international courts. We then explain how rights-claiming initiates a process for authoritatively determining past violations of the law, identifying remedies for those violations, and preventing future violations. Because judicializing international relations occurs in multiple phases, in multiple locations, and involves multiple actors as decision-makers, governments often do not control the timing, nature, or extent to which political and policy decisions are adjudicated. Delegation—and the associated choice of institutional design features—is thus only the first step in a chain of processes that determine how a diverse array of nonstate actors influence politically consequential decisions.
It is often assumed that government-sponsored election violence increases the probability that incumbent leaders remain in power. Using cross-national data, this article shows that election violence ...increases the probability of incumbent victory, but can generate risky post-election dynamics. These differences in the consequences of election violence reflect changes in the strategic setting over the course of the election cycle. In the pre-election period, anti-incumbent collective action tends to be focused on the election itself, either through voter mobilization or opposition-organized election boycotts. In the post-election period, by contrast, when a favorable electoral outcome is no longer a possibility, anti-government collective action more often takes the form of mass political protest, which in turn can lead to costly repercussions for incumbent leaders.
International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. ...Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil society activism. If so, treaties may be failing to make a difference in those states most in need of reform — the world's worst abusers — even though they have been the targets of the human rights regime from the very beginning. The authors address this question of compliance by focusing on the behavior of repressive states in particular. Through a series of cross-national analyses on the impact of two key human rights treaties, the article demonstrates that (1) governments, including repressive ones, frequently make legal commitments to human rights treaties, subscribing to recognized norms of protection and creating opportunities for socialization and capacity-building necessary for lasting reforms; (2) these commitments mostly have no effects on the world's most terrible repressors even long into the future; (3) recent findings that treaty effectiveness is conditional on democracy and civil society do not explain the behavior of the world's most abusive governments; and (4) realistic institutional reforms will probably not help to solve this problem.
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